Mickey unplugged

Scientists have known for decades that female lab mice or their pheromones cause male lab mice to make ultrasonic vocalizations. But a new paper from researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis establishes for the first time that the utterances of the male mice are songs.

The part I liked best:

Likely areas for follow-up investigation include the question of whether wild mice vocalize in the same manner as laboratory mice, which have been kept and bred inside laboratories for more than a century.

“It’s easy to imagine the wild mouse vocalizations will be different, since ‘domestication’ has changed many aspects of mouse behavior,” Holy says. “So it would be intriguing to find out if their songs are more or less birdlike than the lab mouse songs.”